Countless
by Rinolia
Summary: That was the first time Mello had felt like the world had given up on him.


Author's Note: I have been working on this for a while, and I apologize to anyone who is a fan of my other works, because this is not like that, and if you were looking for that, then I'm sorry you won't get what you are looking for. I have often joked that I cannot write anything serious for the life of me, but much of what goes on inside my head is entirely serious and I use writing as an outlet to not get so damn depressed. And I'm really not a sad person, or an angry person, I would say I am about 98% a happy person. But a lot of the time, especially with my future profession, I cannot help but get genuinely upset and genuinely disturbed at the number of injustices that go on in the world and the amount of times the world does turn its back on people. And I find these people very brave, because I haven't been put in the situation, but I know giving up would be a viable option to me. Also, I had a hard time finding a category to put this under. I find 'angst' to be . . . so much of what the world implies.

Disclaimer: Don't own it.

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_"He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things."_

_-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian_

Mello leaned against the doorframe to his bedroom, blonde hair falling in his eyes as he leaned forward. He listened to Matt carefully down the hallway, lying on the couch and fiddling with one electronic device or another. It was like this every night since they had moved into their apartment and away from Wammy's. When he was sober, he would continuously hint at how he couldn't sleep alone at night, and when he got drunk, all subtlety went out the window and he would basically throw himself at Matt. This would then result in Matt carefully putting Mello to bed, and then trotting back down the hallway to the couch.

Mello knew it wasn't a problem with him. There was sexual tension galore and had been for a good while now. But whenever he actually wanted to act on it, Matt would just smile at him in a patronizing way and do dumb things like putting him to bed when he was drunk and not even lying down next to him. It could be seen as chivalrous and gentlemanly, Mello supposed, but mostly it just pissed him off.

Oftentimes the realization of how sad his life was would come to him at times like this, standing in the darkened hallway of his shitty apartment while his best friend was down the hall, clicking at either a keyboard or a controller. He really wanted to give up, to say to himself that the whole Kira case was pointless and it didn't really matter and they could just go home now. He could never convince himself of these things.

Maybe because anywhere he went would be just as miserable. He was older now, too old to go back to Wammy's, being technically a legal adult. But then again, he didn't know whether that was really home to him. That was just the first time the world had given up on him and he realized he could handle it. It made him jaded, sure, it made him angry, definitely, but more than that it made him realize he could survive through just about anything. From that first day when he was dropped off in a strange country in front of a rich looking building and was told that he was here to achieve something, to do something with his life, to become something, to get a special name and a corresponding letter to peg all his achievements on, he stopped caring that his identity was being taken away from him and realized that he could do absolutely nothing or he could fight like hell, but either way – life still kept on happening to him.

So instead he had sat in a corner with a book and quietly watched a little redheaded kid play video games on a small TV in an anonymous looking playroom. The boy later introduced himself with the name Matt and Mello knew it wasn't his real name, the first thing he had been told was not to let anyone know his real name. He then realized from that moment that what he was called was absolutely irrelevant. In fact, having a 'fake' name was probably better than having a 'real' name. Because a 'real' name wasn't real. It was a set of symbols assigned to correspond to himself, his soul, the bones of him. It didn't do it justice. It never could. In fact, every time something was named about him, Mello felt like he was being taken apart, bit by bit, until absolutely nothing existed anymore.

That was the second time Mello felt like the world had given up on him.

Mello had always made it a point to act exactly as he was feeling. He felt more honest this way. He thought maybe he wouldn't be such a liar if he just let people know what he was thinking. Instead he was just labeled 'emotional' or 'violent.' And he had always thought that it was better to be outright violent and have it be what it was, than to be misleading with words. Words were always violent. Subtly violent. Mello tried his best to negate this by showing as much truth as possible, and realized that people would much rather live with the violence they cannot name than the truths they can realize.

That was the third time Mello felt like the world had given up on him.

So he didn't want to go back to Wammy's – couldn't go back to Wammy's - but he sure as hell did not want to stay where he was. At least at Wammy's he could go through familiar motions: do homework, make fun of Near, but now he was out in the 'real' world, fighting an ideological battle which he wasn't even sure he believed in. But someone believed in it and that brought him into it because he got so angry at things trying to be something that they weren't. He got mad at Kira, he got mad at Matt, and most of the time he just got mad at himself.

When he realized that everyone he ever met was a false representation of themselves, including himself, was the fourth time Mello felt like the world had given up on him.

And after the whole debacle of nearly blowing his own face off, he came to the realization that maybe he could live through anything. And that he would keep on living until the world was ready for him to die. He knew the world wouldn't be sorry to see him go, because the world thus far had given no indication to him that it cared that he existed. Even after Matt had carried him from that burning building and all the way back to their apartment, he did the same thing he always did: put Mello to bed, sat with him a while to make sure his breathing stayed even, and eventually wandered down the hallway again. Sometimes Mello felt like that hallway was really miles long, and even if he had ever tried calling out to Matt, he would never come.

That was the fifth time Mello felt like the world had given up on him.

And so he stood in the dark hallway, listening to an old clock ticking somewhere and Matt doing whatever it was that he does when Mello went to bed. He wanted tears to fill his eyes, wanted to go down the hall and scream at Matt and call him and idiot and ask him why he pretended to be so blind and so numb and so . . . detached, but none of it happened. He still stood there in silence, his eyes remained dry, the clock kept on ticking, and Matt never let up his quiet tapping noises. It was like everything was ignoring a roadblock. A big, giant roadblock that got in the way of truly understanding what the hell was going on. Everyone was caught up in these little ideological arguments and missing the forest for each individual tree which they wound around until they couldn't, wouldn't wind anymore. It all didn't matter, it was all entirely irrelevant, and Mello still found himself going along with it.

And standing there, wishing to feel something but feeling absolutely nothing, it was not the sixth time Mello felt like the world had given up on him. It wasn't the seventh, eighth, or ninth either. He had felt like this every single night and thusly had lost count of the number of times the world had turned its collective back on him.

And instead of throwing a fit about it, or crying silently to himself, he remained staring impassively at the wall in front of him and listening with a careful ear to the noises down the hall. Noises had names, sights had names, and therefore they weren't what they really were either. Mello knew this and he still found comfort in the . . . ease of it all, until he just got mad at everything falsifying themselves to him and turned back into the bedroom to lie down.

He didn't want Matt to tell him that he loved him. Because that also would have been a lie. You can't tell someone that, because it doesn't mean anything. Or it will always mean less than it should, if it meant something at all. He just wanted Matt to come lie down next to him, so he wouldn't have to feel so alone.

He knew that after the last person he helped died, he would die as well. Even if he was still alive, or even if he had died long before. He wouldn't be remembered, and therefore, wouldn't exist. Even though he was slaughtered every day every time someone would call for him, would yell "Mello," down a street, down a hallway, right next to him. He would have liked to get sad about this, but found that it just didn't matter. Until he lost all interest, he would continue with his own brand of vigilante justice.

Because while he had lost count of the number of times the world had given up on him, he could not, even though he tried continuously, he could not give up on the world.

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The eeeeennnddd. So cheery, ne? It was pretty much the result of what happened after my mind basically exploded one night. I need to stop thinking and start sleeping.

Please review!


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